The last days of summer

For the last two weeks I have been working at a village called Culworth near Banbury for a lady who owns about an acre of ground equally divided between garden and paddock. In one corner of the paddock is a duck pond which is home to her eight ducks, and then there are two poultry houses for the sixteen chickens which free range everywhere during daylight hours.

My regular jobs were to let out and feed the poultry in the morning and to make sure they were all securely shut in at night, weed various borders, clip overgrown bushes and I also rebuilt a little stone wall around a raised bed. A couple of the hens sussed out that when I went out armed with a fork to do battle with the couch grass, they were in for a treat if they stuck close to me - I have never seen such big worms disappear down a throat so fast! Some of the time I was in danger of stabbing the hens with the fork tines as they darted in to grab a juicy morsel from right under where I was working.

Culworth is a very pretty village with most of the houses built of the local sandstone which is a deep ochre colour with occasional red stones and grey stones mixed in. Many of the houses have steeply sloping roofs which, I think, usually indicates that they were once thatched and, because the village was situated on an important sheep drove from the Midlands to Banbury, there are a disproportianate number of large, impressive houses - Culworth Hall, Culworth Manor, Culworth Court, etc. The church is also quite large for a relatively small village and sits next to 'Culworth Castle' which is a hillock and ditch where a Norman castle once stood. In the churchyard there is an interesting tombstone to one 'Charles Bacchus (An African)' and there is some debate over whether he was a slave or not - he definitely worked as a servant for a family and was well thought of, but it seems odd that they should have spent such a lot of money having a tombstone erected in his memory.

The weather while I was there was very changeable and we had some torrential rain and thunderstorms (Oxfordshire does seem to be good at those) and some days I would be unable to garden for the whole day. On one particularly wet day, Juliet took me to visit another lady who is an unofficial Wwoof host. I had seen her adverts for help in the back of the Wwoof News and was intrigued to see what her setup was like. I mentioned her to Juliet and it turned out that she knew her a little bit as she did furniture restoration and had repaired a coffee table for her. We set off across country going down smaller and smaller lanes until we stopped next to a very hump-backed bridge where there was a little car park. From the car park we took a small path that led onto the towpath of the Oxford Canal and then, about a quarter of a mile along the path, we came to Phoebe's house - it's a lock keeper's cottage! Phoebe has grand ideas for her new vegetable garden but has neither the time nor the energy to devote to it as she has to work during the week, hence the need for wwoofers. I was glad to have made contact and will keep in touch in case she needs anyone next August time when Cropredy is creeping round again.

On another of my days off, which turned out to be very warm and sunny, I spent quite a lot of time mooching about the canal basin in Banbury watching the boats going up and down through the lock - some more expertly than others! Then I drove back through Cropredy and mused on how different the weather can be in this country over the space of a week.

I left Culworth after breakfast on Bank Holiday Monday and drove back through the beautiful Cotswold countryside. There was a definite autumnal bite in the air, the sky was an unbroken blue and most of the corn had been harvested from the fields. I became quite reflective and decided that I really like this nomadic way of life: every two weeks or so you pack up and move on with your host's appreciation echoing in your head. Jeni says that she needs to feel appreciated to feel good about herself and I suppose this is true for all of us - I know that when I worked in an office a simple 'thank you for your efforts' (I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times that happened in five years) made me glow, so having my praises sung every two weeks and invitations to return whenever I can, is going a long way to boosting my confidence and in two weeks no-one can discover the huge flaws in my character!